Universiteit Leiden

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Keynote lecture

How the world made the West: a 4000-year history

Date
Friday 29 November 2024
Time
Location
Lipsius building
Room
0.28

How the world made the West: a 4000-year history

The West, the story goes, was built on the ideas and values of Ancient Greece and Rome, which disappeared from Europe during the Dark Ages and were then rediscovered by the Renaissance. But what if that isn't true? I argue that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe, and that too much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept – developed in the Victorian era – of separate 'civilisations'. 

Moving from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration this lecture will trace the millennia of global encounters and exchange that built what is now called the West, as societies met, tangled and sometimes grew apart. From the creation of the alphabet by Levantine workers in Egypt, who were prompted to write things down in their own language for the first time in a foreign land to the arrival of Indian numbers in Europe via the Arab world, this lecture will the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong. 

It is contact and connections, rather than solitary civilisations, that drive historical change. It is not peoples that make history – people do.

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